


Blizzard

by MissVioletHunter



Series: The Storm series [3]
Category: Wallander (UK TV)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 07:37:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissVioletHunter/pseuds/MissVioletHunter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Final installment of the Storm series. It's winter again in Ystad, and Magnus laments the loss of the woman he pursued many months before. Could he have a last chance at happiness?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blizzard

**"Snow in Sweden brings beauty but halts travel"  
**

**"A strong Baltic storm is expected to dump up to 1.5 feet of snow and ring blizzard conditions to central and eastern parts of the country next Wednesday. At least 8 inches will fall in Malmö, probably disrupting public transit in the Swedish town and its surroundings, and grounding most air traffic in and out of the regions' busiest airport. About 6,000 people could lose power in the southern region as temperatures will be stuck below freezing all day. Several Nobel Prize laureates, expected to arrive in Stockholm prior to next week's awards ceremony, will be delayed due to the whiteout conditions."**

"Come out with your hands up, mate, and we'll all be able to go home!"

I heard Wallander's lie and stifled an impatient huff as I crouched behind the Polis car, my gun (and Kurt's) pointed at the door of the warehouse.

A drugs bust that had developed into a hostage situation was not exactly the kind of thing that could be solved peacefully in a minute, and I knew that the man inside the building wouldn't come out pacifically. He was the second engineer of a cargo ship that transported electric machinery, and somehow he had thought it a good idea to smuggle a considerable amount of cocaine inside the double bottom of one of the ship's containers. A trained dog had detected the stuff, but what should have been an easy arrest had turned into a bit of a mess when the individual produced a gun out of nowhere, shot the captain of his ship and managed to take the port pilot hostage.

There was no easy way out for the smuggler and he knew it; we had him cornered into one of the port's warehouses, and for more than an hour the man had resisted any threat, promise of leniency or attempt at negotiation.

"Mr. Eklund, let that woman go and we'll be able to talk peacefully!"

Wallander was not a good liar, that was clear, and he was also growing impatient. It was the first Sunday of Advent, and the last thing the department needed was a dead hostage in our hands to screw what had been a pretty good year, at least in numbers. Besides, the hostage in question was an acquaintance of Kurt's, and he had a personal interest in seeing her to safety. I knew the pilot, a stout middle-aged woman that had more experience at the sea than anyone else in town. She wasn't the kind of person who would faint, become hysterical or do anything stupid in a situation like that, but being held at gunpoint wasn't exactly the best way to go back to work after a quiet weekend.

A professional negotiator was on his way from Stockholm, but I feared he wouldn't arrive in time. The man in the warehouse was desperate and his demands were getting crazy: first he asked for a car, and ten minutes later he changed his mind and demanded a helicopter. A stupid request, especially because it was four in the afternoon, already dark, and the sky was covered in thick, fluffy clouds that were usually the prelude of heavy snow. When the first flakes started to fall we were still hiding behind the car, waiting for the reinforcements to arrive and sitting on our frozen asses.

While Kurt was on the phone with the negotiator, I observed how a snowflake landed softly on the barrel of my gun. A small, delicate thing of beauty in the middle of a dirty, messy situation. My mind wandered slowly to a different place, a different time, thousands of kilometers away from the chilly coast of Sweden...

* * *

_"Come with me. Now. We can be back in Ystad in two days... I don't have much to offer, but everything I own is yours if you want me."_

_"No, Magnus. Not like this. I have a decision to make, and I must do it alone. I have to do this... for him, and for you."_

_"You don't love him."_

_"Not every story is a love story... Not everything in life is about love. Felix is still my husband, and he deserves a last chance before I move out of his life forever."_

_"Don't speak his name! He doesn't deserve you."_

_"You don't know how much I owe him. You don't know what... what my life was like when I met him five years ago. He pulled me out of my personal circle of hell, and I owe him this much. If you and I are going to have a future together I need time to think, to explain, to make him understand."_

_"Make me understand. You have given him five years of your life... tell me why do you think you owe him anything else."_

_"I know I'm being selfish, but I need to be sure of what I'm doing. Once I leave there's no turning back."_

_"Vivianne, I lov..."_

_"No! Don't say it. Please, don't say anything."_

She had raised a delicate finger to my lips, and that was the end of it. We had been together, in the camp, for five days. During all those days she had avoided that conversation, the one that I had hesitated to start. Finally, on my last day at Merzouga, I got my answer... the answer I dreaded. I didn't understand what twisted sense of obligation was tying her to her insipid husband, but in the end it seemed to be stronger than the link between us.

Our goodbye was bittersweet. I was so angry... at her for leaving me, at Felix for existing, and the whole world for not letting me have what I wanted so much. But she looked resigned and infinitely sad, and her tears when we parted were so disarming that I would have said anything to stop them from falling. She wanted to give her marriage a final, desperate chance, and there was no way I could fight against that. I returned to Ystad, back to work.

Back to the numb nothingness that my life was now, away from my darling beauty, my life, my Vivianne. Only... she wasn't mine and she never had been. She was lost to me forever.

* * *

"Fuck, Martinsson! Come back to Earth!"

"All that daydreaming will kill you some day, Magnus", interrupted Anne-Brit's voice. I hadn't realized that another Polis car had arrived with her and Nyberg, or that Wallander was looking at me as if I had broken his precious collection of opera records.

"Get back on your feet, Martinsson! The negotiator is not going to arrive on time, and I have an idea." Of course he did, and of course his idea involved putting _me_ in the line of fire.

People think that a shooting lasts for minutes, but that only happens in movies. In real life, everything takes place in a matter of seconds. You react on instinct, point, shoot, and everything's over before you can say _bullet_.

This time was no different. At Wallander's orders, Nyberg pretended to be the negotiator and coaxed the smuggler to the door of the warehouse with indulgent promises. The man appeared, holding the pilot in front of him and pointing a gun to her head, but his hands were trembling. We were not exactly dealing with a cold, experienced assassin, nor with a particularly intelligent man.

He didn't realize that I had climbed to the roof of the warehouse, and had now a perfect target on the back of his head.

Two seconds was all it took: While Nyberg talked incessantly of the imaginary helicopter that was on its way, I hailed the man from my vantage point. Exactly as Kurt had predicted, the man turned around, letting go of the hostage, and took a shot at me without even pointing. Of course, in that fraction of a second I had ducked and crawled back to a safe area of the roof, and Anne-Brit was already getting the pilot to safety. When the man saw that I was out of reach, he turned to face Kurt again... but by then Wallander's gun was a centimeter away from his forehead.

All solved and wrapped up, and everybody could go home, as Wallander had predicted. Well, except for the now jailed smuggler, of course. And me. I stayed late at the station, trying to keep my mind occupied with the report of the case. It was almost dinner time when my phone started ringing, and I took a glance at the name on the screen.

Annika.

I ignored the call, but two minutes later a loud 'ding' announced an incoming message.

 _'Fancy going for a drink, detective?_ _I'm free at eight. xxx A.'_

Three kisses. Great. I didn't want to deal with Annika that night, with her incessant talk and vapid gaze. She was fun at first, a good-natured girl with pretty red hair, loud pink lipstick and very long lashes that she batted all the time in a carefully calculated movement. Just the last of a bunch of women (seven... or maybe nine?) that I had dated briefly, fucked a few times, and then, when they became a bit too attached, stubbornly ignored until they left me alone... and the time for ignoring this one was definitely close. They never lasted too much, that kind of girls. They reminded me of strawberry ice cream: sweet but inconsistent, sometimes good enough for a second serving but in the end too cloying and boring to become my permanent choice of dessert.

Especially when I had savored perfection a few months before, and her bittersweet aftertaste lingered in my mind, spoiling every other meal I tried.

With a frustrated grunt I turned off the computer at my desk, grabbed my phone and dialed the girl's number.

* * *

"Oh, yes! Y-yes, like that! Oh!"

I tightened my grasp on Annika's hips, gathering her wrinkled skirt up, and pressed my lips together, because when you have a girl on all fours on the back seat of your car and you're screwing the living daylights out of her it's bad manners to tell her to shut up. Instead, I moved my right hand to cover her mouth. She didn't get the hint but seemed to like the new game, and started to suck on my fingers with a high-pitched moan.

Good enough, no more words for a while. Taking mental note of the little space between my head and the roof of the Volvo, I kept pounding into my excessively loud ladyfriend, staring out of the car window into the snowy night. Annika withered and whimpered while I slammed myself into her with determination; her tiny body felt like a toy in my hands. She liked it rough, and the little trick of muffling her was getting her close to heaven very fast. I grabbed one of her small breasts with my free hand, pinching and squeezing her pale, glistening flesh until she started to cry out my name (had she been this fucking loud all the other times?) and clench around me. Too fast, too soon, but I knew she wouldn't mind finishing me off later. It was always like this now, beastly, predatory. Always taking and giving nothing of the real me in return.

The car heating was on, but it was so freezing cold outside that I couldn't help shivering when I detached myself from the girl and fell on the slightly damp pleather of the car seat. Being her usual clingy self, she straddled me and started to nibble on my neck. It was nice, but not exactly what I wanted, so I gave her a pleading look and a nudge in the right direction, and she finally humored me, sucking me off with skilful moves. My eyes were wide open, but I was imagining my hands buried in a different mass of long black locks, another mouth bringing me to ecstasy, other hands running up my thighs.

Seven girls, or nine, so many different bodies and voices, and none of them was the right one. No, the right one only lived inside my head now, whispering sweet imaginary words in my ear while I tried to concentrate on the up-and-down movement of Annika's head of red curls close to my groin, on the way she moaned around me, on the lustful look she gave me between her lashes, with a triumphant smile, when I finally climaxed and she swallowed every drop.

After taking the girl home I felt funny, as if I was incubating some sickness. I needed a bit of air, so I parked and got out of the car, in the middle of the falling snow, smoking one cigarette after another. The sky was completely white now and the snow had started to pile up on the sides of the road. Time to go home.

I pretended that the uneasiness in my stomach had nothing to do with the fact that I had just fucked a girl while thinking of a different one... and that I missed my former lover with an intensity that left me deeply unsettled. But she had moved on, apparently, back to her husband and to being an honest woman, and I was just a nobody, leaning on the hood of an old Volvo, on a deserted alley behind a dock warehouse (yes, _that_ same dock warehouse where a man had taken a shot at me a bit earlier), in a nondescript wintery night.

Not that I hadn't tried to wait, to be patient and give Vivianne time to make up her mind. We had agreed on no phone calls, and no emails that could leave a trace on her laptop, so we had to resort to old-style letters. I sent mine to a post office box, to avoid being detected. I had also agreed not to pressure her or force a decision out of her. Because of that, my letters were the kind I could send to a cousin or an old friend: weather reports, local gossip, comments on international news, complaints about Wallander and his occasionally shitty attitude. She answered me with long tales of her activities on the Doctors Without Borders camp, the story of her return to Agadir (and, alas, to her husband's house), and silly little news from the land of the heat and the sun.

I had gone over every one of her letters dozens of times, trying to find hidden meanings in the phrasing, in the number of times she wrote my name on each page, in the way she slipped a quote, a line from a poem, a personal thought between the ordinary news. Even the two or three paragraphs in Swedish that she included, grammar mistakes and all, on each letter (we communicated in English most of the time) made me hope that she was practising the language with the final goal of coming back to Ystad, back to me.

Finally by the end of summer the last letter, also the shortest and more concise of them all, informed me of the immediate return of Madame and Monsieur Hubert to the south of France. My heart sank, along with the little hope that I had left. Back to France meant that they were looking for a new start together, and that I was out of the picture.

I cried that day, silently cursing the dreams that had brought her to me so many times. Dreams of her eyes, her warmth, the echo of her laughter. I saw her constantly in the darkness beneath the stars, in the yellow light of the dawn. She could thaw the coldness in my heart like no one else before, but in the end she chose her duty over her feelings, and I was left alone. I also got drunk that night, hoping to drown the memories of my failed romance within the alcoholic mist of a bottle of cheap vodka. When a third of the bottle had disappeared, I remembered that the barista of the new Starbucks that had just opened (with great commercial vision) in front of the Polis station had given me her number the day before. At first I didn't even remember her name (Ida, according to her spidery handwriting on the brown paper napkin), but an hour later we were drinking together, and the next morning I woke up with a monumental hangover and a freckled blonde sprawled on my bed.

I had managed to forget about Vivianne for a grand total of twenty minutes before her face had appeared in my mind while a couple of fingers of my right hand were making the Starbucks girl moan so loud that my next door neighbour complained.

Since that day I dedicated all my efforts to forget. The most I could manage were three days in October, thanks to a bank robbery that had everyone at the station working extra shifts. The usual interval was just a few hours. I didn't get drunk again, because it felt like I was just soaking my sorrows instead of drowning them, but there were other girls. After the barista there was one that was the singer in a band. Then the teacher, the salesgirl, the University student from Malmö that had asked me to handcuff her to the headboard...

Unfortunately for me, all of them shared a fundamental defect: they were trying to fill up a space that was already occupied. I took what I wanted from them and moved on to the next warm and eager body, paying no attention to what they could feel, or think. And I could open my bed to them, but my heart was still covered in ice.

* * *

Throwing the cigarette stub to the ground, I got in the car and headed back home. I had been lost in my thoughts for too long, and it was snowing with much more intensity. There was more than enough time to get to my flat before the accumulated snow would block the roads, but according to the weather forecast on the radio things could get ugly during the night. After a short drive I parked in front of my building and covered the Volvo with a tarp to avoid having to shovel my way into the car the following day. I entered the building huffing and stomping my feet on the ground to shake off the cold and the snowflakes, and climbed the stairs with heavy steps, longing for a cup of coffee and a good night's sleep.

Something odd caught my attention as I approached my flat: there was light coming from under the door, and I never, never left any lights on while I was away. I drew my gun, for the second time that day, not knowing what kind of threat I would find inside. The door was closed but not locked; another anomaly. I secretly hoped for a petty thief, some idiot that I could scare the shit of before arresting him for having the nerve to break into _my_ place.

The intruder was standing right in the middle of my living room, wearing a light yellow dress and high heel boots, and with a fluffy wool coat hanging from her arm and a small suitcase beside her. Not the usual attire for a burglar.

"The first time I saw you there was a gun in your hand, too. Am I that dangerous, Magnus?"

"You're the most lethal woman I've ever met. And now you seem to have acquired the power to slip through closed doors."

"Fru Svenson from the 2b remembered me, and she has a spare key of every flat. I would have waited on the street, but the snow..."

The snow had morphed from delicate flakes to tiny flying razors that were banging against the windows, accompanied by the howling of the wind. I gazed at the woman before me, taking in all the things that I had missed for months: the way the light reflected on her hair (a couple of inches shorter than the last time I'd seen her), the irresistible curve of her Cupid's bow, the gesture of her nervous hands fidgeting with the buttons of her gloves. But above all that there was a black cloud of pain. The pain that I had been experiencing for a long time, knowing that I could have any woman I wanted... any woman but her.

"When... how...?"

"I took the ferry from Świnoujście this morning, and arrived two hours ago."

Two hours. She had disembarked from the ferry a mere fifty meters from the alley where I had been, on that same moment, drilling mercilessly into the tight heat of an overexcited Annika.

"This has to end. Now. Let's stop these cat and mouse games across the world."

"What?" God, she was especially beautiful when she looked confused.

"I need you to set me free, Vivianne. No more waiting, no more fueling my hopes and then running back to your husband. I want you to tell me that you won't see me again, that I was the biggest mistake of your life. I want to hate your guts for being so damn cruel to me, to curse your name every time I remember it for the next couple of months. And then, I want to be able to live again, to have a heart again... One that belongs to me, one that's not a pathetic prisoner in your hands."

Her hands. She held them in front of her for a moment, still covered in the finest pair of gloves.

I closed the door of the flat and walked past her towards the sofa, where I let myself fall. I couldn't bring myself to look at her. Why wasn't she saying anything? Was it so hard to finally grant me my freedom?

A white calfskin glove fell on the low table before me, and I looked at the object, quite perplexed. What the fuck was this, a medieval challenge? Then its twin from the left hand joined the first glove on the varnished surface.

I raised my eyes to Vivianne, who stood before me with an enigmatic smile on her face and her hands primly crossed in her lap, and then I mentally smacked myself for being such an impulsive oaf. Because, on the ring finger of her left hand, there was a mark. The kind of pale mark left when you're in the sun for a long time wearing a ring, and then... you take it off.

I should have known, should have recognized this new air of determination that surrounded her, but I had been too busy being angry at her... I grabbed her hand and brought it to my lips in a contrite gesture of mute adoration, because I wasn't able to speak.

"I signed the divorce papers in Marseilles last week. Everything was faster than I thought, but my lawyer had forbid me any contact with you while the proceedings lasted... Not even by letter. I had no way of letting you know, and I wasn't sure that you... that you hadn't moved on."

Moved on? Yes, in a way... a purely physical way, but with my heart firmly entrenched in the past. I pulled her close and buried my face in her lap, because I feared the way she would look at me after my next words.

"I've been with other women." A poor choice of words, _been with_... more like _used_ them as a poor substitute of her. The last of them just hours before, but of course I couldn't tell her that.

And then, a hand on my cheek, silently asking me to look her in the eye. "Magnus, I've been _married_. We never made any promises, there were no strings between us, and... what kind of person would I be if I held that against you?"

"Still a better person than me."

"Don't say that. I'm here now, and..." she sat beside me, close to me, her only choice of movement because I refused to let go of her hand. "I talked to Fru Svenson when I arrived. Her sister has a spare room to let, and I can move immediately. I didn't want any alimony, so the only money I have are the thousand euros that I got when I sold my wedding ring, but I will start looking for a job tomorrow, and then..."

I had to silence her with my lips, because the thought of her living anywhere else made me feel sick to my stomach. "If I have to barricade the door and wall up the windows to keep you here, I will, but you're not going to live anywhere else. You got away from me once, but not this time... never again."

"Magnus, I need to know that I can provide for myself. I haven't had a real job in years", she protested, weakly.

"The job thing is fine. Selling your wedding ring was a fantastic idea. Living at Fru Svenson's sister's is unacceptable", I whispered against the soft skin of her cheek. "Did you really walk out without asking for any money?"

"I had nothing when I got married; it was only fair that I got out of it in the same state."

I couldn't help laughing, the first genuine laugh in many weeks. "You're a saint. We'll see if you still think the same after trying to live with the salary of a Polis inspector."

Vivianne giggled, but after that there were no more words, no more plans for the future, no more conjectures about what our life together would be... there were only small kisses, light caresses, tight embraces, shared breath, and a growing sense of happiness that radiated from both of us. We didn't even make love that night; we just lingered in each other's arms, watching the weak light of the dawn pour over the snowy, silent streets. Finally, more than a year after our first, fateful encounter, I was hers and she was mine.

And the rest of the world simply disappeared.

**Author's Note:**

> Magnus and Vivianne will be back (at some point) with a murder mystery multi-chapter story.


End file.
